I loved this story from yesterday’s Independent newspaper about a couple of insane (got to be) self-employed Danish engineers who’ve built their own space rocket.  Costing £41,000 in total, roughly 0.02% of average cost of a Nasa space mission, this rocket will allow them to see the Earth and experience weightlessness for about five minutes before it falls back into the Baltic Sea.

Their quest has been made possible from the donations of between 10p and £2000 from members of the public and sponsors. It kind of reminded me of the yawning gap that exists between the marketing budgets of small biotech and lifescience companies compared to big pharma.  But I’m funny that way.

So.  Let’s say you’ve got about 12p to spend on marketing your lifescience business.  Well, maybe a bit more…but not much.  What could you do to launch your product or service into the stratosphere?

Here are some (relatively inexpensive) initial suggestions.

1.  Launch an online questionnaire or poll, perhaps with a prize draw. I saw one by Salesforce this week, offering an iPad for all participants – only thing that stopped me was the time it would take (30 mins – too long).  Think of what you can do with the outcome: you can gain valuable insight into your market needs and wants; you’ll have a list of people who are interested enough to take part so you can grow your network; you can publish the answers in a blog/tweet or a discussion on LinkedIn (see below) and you’ll raise awareness of your company in a positive, and not annoying, way.

2.  Answer questions and take part in group discussions in LinkedIn. This is something you can just pop in and out of but if you consistently interact with your network and reach beyond your immediate contacts, it’s a great way to break the ice and give you some free credibility in your sector.

3.  Set up a series of direct email campaigns. You can do this yourself via www.mailchimp.com or if you have a Salesforce account, use a free third party app to bolt on a direct mail service, which connects with your database.  Use clear and enticing language though – it has to be immediately compelling.  See www.copyblogger.com for tips and DON’T cut and paste from your papers.

4.  Conduct a webinar.  Use your connections on Twitter/LinkedIn/your contacts database and talk about your technology and how it will help your audience.  You can raise awareness via tactic (3).

5.  Attend a relevant scientific meeting and present a poster. I’m strongly in favour of making sure that any scientist attending a meeting goes with a poster at the very least, and knows how to use that to gain contacts and meetings with potential clients.  I think the distance between the business development and scientific teams has to diminish and this is one way to narrow the gap.  Nobody can afford to send scientists on jollies any more – there has to be some tangible benefit for the good of the company.

6.  Build and nurture your Twitter account. You might not like the idea now, thinking perhaps that this is the realm of Lady Gaga and not Serious Biotech.  There are already a ton of pharma/biotech editors there and an increasing number of investors, senior level directors and researchers gathering in the Twittersphere so I’d strongly argue that it’s already relevant to this sector so why wait?  It takes time to build your following and make valuable connections with otherwise total strangers in your field and you’d be missing another free way to make important connections.

7.  Make sure your website is optimized for search engines. There are some low cost tools available to help and the investment in time will be worth it.  Otherwise you’ve got to wonder why you should bother with a website at all.

8.  Pay Per Click advertising using Google Adwords.

9.  Post a video on YouTube.  See Inkspot Science’s example here – simple, inexpensive and a highly effective way to describe to potential clients how your product will help them- in less than a minute, which is all anyone has these days.

O.K, so the tools might be free or cheap, but the time it takes to learn and use them to the best advantage is by no means trivial.  I know of a couple of small companies who have highly active blogs and Twitter accounts, posting daily on the topics related to their sector, and they manage this by sharing the blog posting and tweeting amongst a team.

With some upfront delineation of the company policies regarding social marketing, (see Roche or Coca Cola for leading examples of this), you’ll set the entire company on the path to business growth and that in the very least, has to be fun whilst it lasts….